The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
CERN
promises to completely revolutionize current particle physics.
The LHC will collide protons at a center of mass energy of 14 TeV, seven
times higher than that of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, and at a luminosity
more than ten times greater.
The Higgs Boson is the last missing ingredient of the
Standard Model. It's discovery will provide important information on the
Higgs mechanism that is believed to be the source of all mass.
Most excitingly the LHC will likely yield discovery of supersymmetry (SUSY) the ultimate symmetery of nature. The LHC should provide the discovery of most of these supersymmetric partners leading to a very extensive research program of sorting out their mass spectra and branching ratios. Experiments at the LHC may also address other more exotic possiblities such as extra space-time dimensions. The Compact Muon Spectrometer (CMS) is one of two large detector facilities built to do experiments at the LHC. Startup of data taking is expected in 2009.
Token Bit Manager Chip
This is a custom-designed, radiation-hard IC that will orchestrate the readout of the the pixel detector. The chip was designed at Rutgers and has been fabricated in the IBM 0.25um process. A TBM upgrade for CMS for the SuperLHC is currently being designed here. |
Pixel Front End Controller
The Pixel FEC is a custom electronics VME module that communicates to the CMS pixel TBM and Readout Chip using fiber optics. It will individually program all 17,000 readout chips before each data run begins as well as sending event trigger during a data run. Rutgers has overall responsibilty for the Pixel FEC software and firmware. |
Pixel Sensors
A severe requirement on the pixel detector is that it be able to survive in an exceedingly harsh radiation environment. At Rutgers we are working on developing sensors based on diamond which should, by at least an order of magnitude, be more radiation hard than those based on silicon. |
Pixel Luminosity Telescope
The PLT is a novel luminosity monitor for CMS using synthetic single crystal diamond sensors. The diamonds are segmented into pixels of the same pattern and dimensions used in the CMS Pixel detector and bumpbonded to a standard Pixel readout chip. Rutgers designed this detector and is in charge of the construction. In addition Rutgers has designed several custom ICs for this detector. It is anticipated to be installed inside of CMS as early as 2010. |
Rutgers physicists lead several analysis efforts, and have evaluated in detail sensitivity to new physics with early LHC data. Given our extensive Tevatron experience, our strong point is realistic evaluations of the Standard Model backgrounds, which leads to robust analyses suitable for LHC startup. We also work closely with Rutgers theorists to develop search strategies for new physics that could be missed by standard search techniques.
Our analysis efforts include: